The Incline

The Incline

I’m not sure how many of you have ever heard of The Incline in Manitou Springs (right next to Colorado Springs, CO). Here’s  a link to a good NYT article on it. I’ve heard of it for a while and Saturday afternoon (4/18/2010), I got my chance to hike it. Well, “hike” is a matter of definition, much of the time it’s more like climbing a set of stairs or even a ladder in some places. 68% is one damn steep slope. A worthy workout if ever there was one. So, the last day of my La Ruta training camp we started with about 3 hours of mountain biking.  Then we changed into running shoes and did this. The GPS data from my trip up The Incline is here. Actually that’s the incline and then the run down the trail to where we left our bikes and then a ride back to CTS. I should have re-set the GPS in between, but oh, well.

My time up the one mile was just at 35 min. I didn’t know the official start or stop points, so the segment I timed went about 35:40, but that was more than the official points, so I estimated. We started up as a group of four of us, that group had been riding together for most of the day. For probalby the first half of the climb we stayed pretty close and then two of us pulled ahead. I was drafting off the guy who was in front. Ok, “drafting” is really not right, but it was an advantage to have someone pacing me. Where the angle tapers off in probably the last 0.1 miles, I pulled ahead and made an pretty strong effort for the top, finishing ahead. No, I’m really not competitive, right?  Damn happy with that performance. Especially so since I had done the long ride beforehand. Link to the ride data is here. That ride was about 3800′ of climbing and we were moving right along the entire time. A good portion of that ride was on some sweet single track and some really technical sections. Techical enough to require me to do a rapid exit over the bars after missing a drop. No real damage done to the bike or to me. Would have been good if the guy behind me had been wearing a helmet cam, but no such luck. The first big climb on the ride was on fire roads, but the second climb was on some challenging single track and so was a lot of the rest. For a good part of that first long climb, I had Chris Carmichael pacing off my rear wheel. He’s a really cool guy, very intersting to talk to and it definitely is going to be fun riding and racing with him. The rest of the camp was interesting and fun. Did a lot of testing, and some skill training. I did pretty well on all of it. Short stats: My VO2Max is 57.1 ml/kg/min and I’m 9.4% body fat. At least I was last week. Target is to up one and drop the other. I just can’t remember which one goes which direction….

This entry was posted on Monday, April 19th, 2010 at 2:21 pm and is filed under adventure, endurance. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.